Google rolled out an update before entering into the new year and it was kind to roll the Page Rank update as well, honoring my websites with good Page Rank.
All was good and we slowly transitioned into the new year with lots of hope and energy to do better this year.
And everything was going fine until the 9th of January, when I saw a huge drop in my traffic of my various websites.
And two of my big websites, which were doing well in the Google Search, and were getting thousands of visitors per day were getting few hundreds only just overnight. It was something I did not see in the last one year.
The first thing I checked was the downtime of my websites to see if my websites were not down for most of the time or they have been suspended by the hosting provider, but everything was normal there.
The next thing I did was to log into my Google Webmaster Tools account and see If all the pages were indexed or not, but everything was normal there as well.
And when I looked at the search queries, there was a huge drop in impressions which resulted in less clicks to the blog pages.
The traffic to both my websites dropped on the same days, i.e, 9th January.
SE Roundtable posted that it could be a Google update and I did find a discussion thread at Warrior forum where people talked about the significant impact in Search Engine rankings. And some people called it a Penguin 2.0 update which is mostly related to bad back links.
But I highly doubt that, because even if we consider that removing bad links is the motive of this update, only one of my website could potentially be the victim of it, but the other website is pretty clean with no good or bad back links at all. However, it does get some good back links from authority sites, there is no chance it can lose traffic to to bad back links, So I think there could be something more than just a spam control update which falls in the category of Penguin updates.
I’ll be writing more about my findings and maybe do a follow up of this post if I am able to recover from this update ever.
If your websites are affected on the same date, before or after 9th January, please mention in the comments below.
